Michael Crawford: 'I lost all my self-belief. I felt useless'

In 2007, Michael Crawford moved to a small town in New Zealand. He was recovering from myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and filled his days with sailing, gardening and reading.

Crawford, beloved over here for the Seventies sitcom Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and worldwide for the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical The Phantom of the Opera, had decided never to work again.

But then he received the score for a musical adaptation of L P Hartley's classic novel The Go-Between and knew it was time to resurrect his career.

"It arrived completely out of left field, but I just loved it, I was drawn to it," he says, smiling, in his dressing room at the Apollo Theatre, London. "It's a massive project, but it's so beautiful."

In The Go-Between he plays elderly Leo Colston narrating the ultimately tragic events of a longago Edwardian summer when he was 12.

He has loved the chance to work with the three young actors who play the young Leo on alternate nights and the experience evoked memories of when he himself was 12 - making his stage debut in Benjamin Britten's Let's Make an Opera.

"And Hartley was a friend of Britten's, so many connections," he says. "Britten was a wonderful man."

Michael Crawford as Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em

Crawford was born in Sheerness, Kent, the son of Doris, a working class Irish girl and an RAF pilot with whom she had a one-night stand. Doris then married a former sergeant major turned grocer, who was often violent to them both.

A shy and sometimes bullied child (he's made substantial donations to several children's charities), Crawford's soprano voice so impressed neighbours they encouraged him to audition for Britten, leading to roles first on stage then in BBC radio plays.

At 15 he left school and embarked on a film, stage and television career alongside stars such as Gene Kelly, Barbra Streisand (she's sent her good wishes for The Go-Between) and John Lennon, over whom he took top billing in the 1967 film How I Won the War.

During filming in Almería, Spain, he and Lennon shared a house and were often visited by the other three Beatles.

"[Lennon] was 100 per cent professional, always on time, always knew his lines. Every morning we went to work in his Rolls-Royce Phantom with speakers in the mudguards. He'd play Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone as we went through villages, animals were diving out of the way."

I'm extremely nervous about the voice and how I can sustain itMichael Crawford

He's still friends with Paul McCartney and stayed in touch with Lennon, until he left his first wife, Cynthia. "After that everything changed."

Crawford is referring to his imminent ruin, when a financial adviser put all his money in a fraudulent pyramid scheme. "It was three film salaries, an awful lot, and suddenly we had nothing."

Simultaneously, work dried up.

To support them, his wife Gabrielle (whom he divorced in 1975 and with whom he has two daughters) opened a successful cushion shop in Chelsea. "I drove the van and stuffed cushions, but then I was offered [stage farce] No Sex Please, We're British and everything started to go back up."

In 1973, Crawford was cast as the accident-prone Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and he became a household name, with audiences of up to 25 million delighting in the crazy stunts which Crawford performed himself. He reprised the role this year for the BBC's Sport Relief, roller-skating round the London velodrome, bumping into - among others - Olympian Bradley Wiggins and Boris Johnson.

Crawford thinks that simple Frank would never be allowed on television in today's politically correct times.

"I wouldn't describe him as autistic, he was innocent."

Perhaps conscious of a gradual change in attitudes, Crawford has confirmed that he would never want to make another full series.

If Frank brought him fame, it was playing the man in the mask in Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 Phantom that made him rich. The show toured the world and led to a one-man Las Vegas production (the most expensive in history), which he performed 610 times before quitting with a hip injury.

Crawford with Sarah Brightman in The Phantom of the Opera in 1986

"Rehearsing Phantom, you knew you were involved in history; the run-throughs were magical, during certain scenes there'd be silence as people watched it unfold."

Crawford clearly always pushed himself to extremes - performing stunts and mastering various circus skills, including singing while tightrope walking for the 1981 musical Barnum. But his next Lloyd Webber show, 2004's The Woman in White, was one step too far, with the fat suit he wore every night as Count Fosco resulting in severe dehydration that led to the ME.

"With ME, all your self-belief is taken away from you, you feel useless," he says. Such a driven man must have found it devastating, but there's a delightful optimism to Crawford, who prefers always to focus on the positive (his loving extended family, rather than his violent stepfather, is just one example).

He moved to New Zealand partly to be close to his daughter's family in Australia and - aided by his partner, Natasha, an American dancer turned pastry chef - abandoned all thoughts of acting. When he finally returned to the West End in the small role of the eponymous Wizard of Oz in Lloyd Webber's 2011 production, it wasn't so much for glory but for his five, plainly adored, grandchildren. "They'd never seen me on stage and I wanted them to see what I could do."

The Go-Between, however, represents a far greater physical challenge.

"I'm still extremely nervous about the voice and how I can sustain it. The discipline will be enormous, it's going to be the loneliness of the long-distance runner. But it's a labour of love."